"Charles De Lint - Spiritwalk" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

got trapped in a cave, but I think a tree's much more interesting, don't you?"

Because her Merlin lived in a tree.

"Perhaps it was in the idea of a tree," the boy said.

Sara blinked in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"The stories seem to be saying that one shouldn't teach, or else the student becomes too knowledgeable
and then turns on the teacher. I don't believe that. It's not the passing on of knowledge that would root
someone like Merlin."

"Well, then what would?"

"Getting too tangled up in his own quest for understanding. Delving so deeply into the calendaring trees
that he lost track of where he left his body until one day he looked around to find that he'd become what
he was studying."

"I don't understand."

The red-haired boy smiled. "I know. But I can't speak any more clearly."

"Why not?" Sara asked, her mind still bubbling with the tales of quests and wizards and knights that
she'd been reading. "Wereyou enchanted?Are you trapped in that oak tree?"

She was full of curiosity and determined to find out all she could, but in that practiced way that the boy
had, he artfully turned the conversation onto a different track and she never did get an answer to her
questions.

It rained that night, but the next night the skies were clear. The moon hung above the Mondream Wood
like a fat ball of golden honey; the stars were so bright and close Sara felt she could just reach up and
pluck one as though it were an apple, hanging in a tree. She had crept from her bedroom in the northwest
tower and gone out into the garden, stepping secretly as a thought through the long darkened corridors of
the House until she was finally outside.

She was looking for magic.

Dreams were one thing. She knew the difference between what you found in a dream and when you
were awake; between a fey red-haired boy who lived in a tree and real boys; between the dreamlike
enchantments of the books she'd been readingтАФenchantments that lay thick as acorns under an oak
treeтАФand the real world where magic was a card trick, or a stage magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat
onThe Ed Sullivan Show .

But the books also said that magic came awake in the night. It crept from its secret hidden
placesтАФcalled out by starlight and the moonтАФand lived until the dawn pinked the eastern skies. She
always dreamed of the red-haired boy when she slept under his oak in the middle of the garden. But
what if he was more than a dream? What if at night he stepped out of his treeтАФreally and truly, flesh and
blood and bone real?

There was only one way to find out.